SJ: Address Unknown

The last time I went back to school during Back-to-School Season was the year I started NYU’s graduate acting program. I’d been admitted by some miracle/ possible clerical error, and it was a lucky thing, as I had no idea what I’d do if I didn’t get in. I auditioned for no other graduate schools, and applied for a total of zero jobs. Maybe this was because of my laser-like focus on what I wanted, but probably it was because I was a little lazy and a lot 21, and really had no clue how to go about doing much of anything.

On the long list of things I had no idea how to do was find an apartment in New York City. In fairness, this is not an easy task. My admission to Tisch meant I had to skip the 101 of how to find housing as a grown up and advance right to an upper level course that I undoubtedly would not have tested in to.

I took the coming challenge seriously, and planned my summer accordingly. First, I went home to Appleton, WI to make some money waiting tables, though I mostly spent time conducting an unsponsored anthropological research project on the goings-on at my hometown’s bars. That covered June. Next I headed to suburban Maryland to intern for Potomac Theatre Project. This involved working on a couple plays, spending most of the money I’d made in June, and living in a house so dilapidated that all inhabitants coolly expected it to fall down at more or less any moment (it did have a pool, which sort of made up for the mushrooms that grew in between the bathroom tiles). The summer season at the theatre ended Sunday August 29th, I was expected in NYC on Monday, August 30th, and I’d spent the entire summer doing next to nothing about finding a place to live when I got there.

I’d managed to talk my friend Frank into leaving with me on that Sunday night, right after we interns struck the sets and vanished all evidence of our two months of work. This meant getting in Frank’s car around 3am and driving four hours to his parents’ house in New Jersey. We arrived in time to say hi and bye to his father as he headed out to work. I drank the coffee his mother offered, ate a little breakfast, took a two-hour nap in his sister’s room, got on a NJ Transit train, and was at grad school orientation by noon. No problem.

What was a problem was that I was homeless. How exactly I thought this situation would resolve itself is unclear. None of my close friends from college were moving to New York, and though I’d made desperate attempts to attach myself to not-very-close friends’ housing plans, these long-shot options dried up as the summer progressed. In the last conversation I had with a girl named Julie, who had been searching for a New York home all through July, she sounded so desperate and strung out she might have been speaking to me from a war zone. “You don’t know what it’s like, you just don’t know what it’s like. There’s nothing. I can’t help you. You’re going to have to get up here. You’ll see. It’s horrible. Just wait.”

Oh brother.

Frank’s family generously allowed me to stay with them in Jersey as long as I needed to, which meant a lot to me considering I had nowhere else to turn. I’d had two real friends in Brooklyn, but they moved to California the weekend before I came to the city. I had a real ex-boyfriend in Astoria but I was determined not to contact him for anything. I spoke to the people in my department at NYU, but none of my classmates seemed to be looking for housing. They seemed to have figured that out before they arrived.

It’s not just that I had nowhere to live. It’s that I had no idea how to find a place to live. Everyone kept saying something to the effect of, “You have to know somebody.” But how was this helpful? I knew nobody. Did I have to meet people and make friends before I could find a place to live? Could the people I met while I was sleeping in Washington Square Park actually hook me up with an apartment? It didn’t follow. Also, it is important to note (though it pains me to note it) that the internet wasn’t as good at everything as it is now. The answer to finding an apartment was not Craigslist. I circled ads in the Village Voice, I checked bulletin boards, I wrote down phone numbers posted outside buildings that I could never possibly afford. I learned the names of management companies. I made phone call after phone call from phone booths. I learned the important lesson that sometimes strangers don’t call you back. Even if you really want them to. And especially if you don’t exactly have a phone number. Truth is, when I look back, I ask the same question I asked then and I still don’t know the answer – how does anyone ever find a place to live here?

It was as horrible as Julie had warned. I came to school from Jersey in the mornings feeling more deflated everyday. I was sure my classmates, with their signed leases and permanent mailing addresses, suspected I was out of my mind to have started a year like this. I deteriorated quickly, and after a sobbing phone call home to my parents, my mother decided to fly to New York for Labor Day weekend. This was a good thing because Frank’s family was going upstate, and though I could have gone along, they weren’t sure if they’d be back in town in time for me to get to class Tuesday morning. The thought of spending a holiday weekend alone in someone else’s house in Waldwick, New Jersey was just a little more than I could take.

My mother arrived and we spent the weekend together in the city. It was a great comfort to have her in town, but it wasn’t like she’d cracked the code to the New York real estate market either, and the search was mostly still a blind effort. She did, though, equip me with my first cell phone. I hoped it would make all the difference. Surely being reachable at a number other than "my friend’s parents’ house in Jersey” would be a boon in my quest.

My mom headed to the airport Labor Day morning and I was left to fill the day until Frank and family came back from upstate and would once again mercifully open the doors of their home to me.

I took the train to Central Park and wandered around. Just being there made me feel like a real New Yorker. A real, homeless New Yorker. I watched all the people with their friends and their dogs and their babies. I wondered where they lived. I made my way to MOMA, strolled around, sat self-importantly in front of Desmoiselles d’Avignon, listened to all the languages being spoken around me and felt terribly cosmopolitan. Well, cosmopolitan, and homeless. Every hour or so I called Frank’s house, and every hour or so, no one answered the phone.

The day drifted on. I wandered downtown on foot, not wanting to pay for another subway ride. It was late afternoon and the temperature had started to drop. I was strapped with my backpack, loaded with a weekend worth of stuff. I’d been at large in the city for 6 hours. I was tired of walking and I was just plain tired.

I took cover in the Barnes & Noble that used to exist on 6th Avenue and 21st street. I read magazines. I tried to read Important Books. For inexplicable reasons I read the memoir A Child Called ‘It’: One Child’s Courage to Survive. I read more magazines. I called Frank’s. I called again. And again. Soon it was evening. Dinner time. I called again. More magazines. Still no answer.

Worry set in. Maybe they stayed an extra night. Maybe they weren’t coming home. Maybe I had nowhere to go. Maybe there was really, truly, nowhere I could go.

I had about a hundred bucks on me, but I needed to make that last. I had no credit card. I had no debit card. I had classmates I could have maybe called, but all of their phone numbers were in a folder in Jersey. And I had no other friends in New York.

When I remember that day and the 6 hours I spent at Barnes & Noble wondering where I was going to sleep that night, I remember feeling as alone in the world as I’ve ever felt. I remember feeling sorry for myself and I remember feeling friendless. I remember feeling ashamed for having created the situation at all. I remember feeling I was failing.

But here’s the funny thing. It turns out I remember it all wrong.

I dug out an old journal to see if I’d done any writing on or about that day, and sure enough I had, right there at the bookstore. But when I looked over what I’d written, I couldn’t believe what I read. I didn’t sound scared at all. I sounded fine. I wrote like a person who saw she was in a tight spot but knew everything was going to work out. I remember that time like it was one more reckless, bone-headed episode in the course of my messy, screw-up existence, but the me that did it didn’t see it that way. The me that did it was just living her life, figuring it out as she went along, navigating the first chapter of a dream she was making come true, believing she could do it. She was okay. I was okay.

I’m sure there were moments when I had the feelings I remember, but what’s clear in reading what I wrote is that those feelings were not the most important thing. Those feelings were not the story. How strange that I’ve remembered the whole thing so differently. How strange that the story I lived in the moment is so different than the story I’ve told myself since. And what a failure, what a true failure, to sell myself so short in my perception, to imagine I was so much less than my own words show that I am.

But back to the Barnes & Noble…

Eventually Frank answered the phone and I was spared sleeping on a park bench. I got myself to Jersey and spent another night in the home his family so generously shared. A few days later luck won out and I moved into a classmate’s spare room for a few weeks. Not long after that, I found a real honest-to-goodness apartment in Brooklyn (I actually have no memory of how I found the place, but it was found). I moved in with Michael Doyle and a friend of mine from Wisconsin, and together we made sure our first grown-up digs were a place all of our rootless friends could call home if they needed to. We became a sort of Ellis Island for anyone we knew who wandered to town, and before long, I wasn’t so friendless at all.

And as far as I can tell, that’s how you get an apartment in New York City.

MD: An American in Plaster of Paris

So we’ve all been there. You find yourself in a provincial Polish city in the dead of winter studying contemporary theatrical trends in post-communistic societies. The city doesn’t offer much in the way of accommodation, but the septuagenarian nuns who run the dormitory for pilgrims en route to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa offer you a cell for as long as you like. And you’re thinking, “wow, maybe I really can have it all.” You drop off your bags on what feels like the first day of the rest of your life, go off to buy toothpaste and soap and slip on an icy street, bringing down the full weight of your body squarely on your ankle.

I graduated from college and received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study theatre in Eastern Europe. I finagled that plum deal by asserting that censorship had created the need for a non-verbal theatrical language which was then, in 1998, undergoing swift changes as these newly democratic countries maneuvered through their newly found freedoms. I still don’t know if this thesis was accurate, but it’s plausible and sounds impressive especially when you pepper your interview with the following (in no particular order): totalitarianism, paratheatrical, irredentism, Artaudian Ideal, kinesphere, and Plastic People of the Universe. Boom! You’ve got yourself a fellowship!

My ankle was sprained, set in a plaster cast and then two feet of snow fell. Even if I had wrapped my entire leg in plastic, I would not have been able to negotiate snow with a pair of crutches. And this was January, so a thaw was not forthcoming. It was clear that I would not be going outside the dorm for quite sometime. Luckily, the nuns fed me three times a day, but they were the only people in the dorm with me. They did not speak English and, having just arrived in Poland, my Polish was non-existent. I was getting pretty punchy a week and a half into my confinement, but before could go all Shining on the nuns, visitors arrived.

In high school, you find yourself in the cafeteria wanting to sit with the cool kids, but not sure how to wangle an invitation. Well, it was like that the morning when I came down to the dining room to find a group of Spanish missionaries with Polish kids my own age. They were clearly the coolest kids in school, being the only kids in school. Devoted as they were to doing God’s work, they offered me a seat at their table. And they spoke English! I talked and talked and talked with my new best friends. Finally when I stopped to catch my breath, I learned that the Spanish missionaries (Maria Josefa, Maria Lourdes, Maria Dolores and Pepe) were here to hold a week-long retreat to get these young Poles interested in missionary work. I promptly let it be known that I was a real Catholic and knew all the prayers and stuff. They picked up on the hint and invited me to join them. In fact, they felt that we should honor all of God’s gifts, so why don’t I direct them in a play?

I really wanted to direct Lysistrata, but it was “strongly suggested” that we might do something from the Gospels. We settled on The Good Samaritan because it had the most drama: violence, the human condition, plot twist – “wait, the Samaritan good guy? Whoa!”

I had not gone to theatre for almost three months, first because of the Christmas holidays and now because I could not leave the Nunhouse. My fellowship was probably never in danger of being revoked, but being the dutiful student I was and with a quarterly report due to the foundation, I felt that I needed to make this opportunity count. Besides, this was my chance to put into practice everything I’d been studying and learning in the past six. Here was my European directorial debut handed to me on a silver paten! But more than that, I saw my work on “The Good Samaritan” – or Samaritan! if it ever came to Broadway - as being, well maybe not God’s work, but at least Grotowski’s work.

Jerzy Grotowski was the Polish theatre director who got me interested in this thesis. He started working in the 1960s creating a “poor theatre” that aimed at stripping away artifice from the theatrical experience and focus on the communion of audience and actor. While not being overtly political, the authorities found his work subversive because it was clearly communicating something beyond its verbal narrative. His work directly led the way for other such artists and political dissidents. I wanted to document and absorb this style myself. What I was going to do with it, I did not really understand, but I wanted to make this my own.

In my priggish way, I tried to impress upon my missionary actors the critical nuance of what I was trying to achieve in our acting exercises and in my expressionistic directorial choices. They had no idea what I was talking about. Probably because I had no idea what I was saying. We took this “production” to a local nursing home. It was not the debut I imagined for myself, but it was something. And our audience of barely sentient pensioners were happy to have something to watch.

Perhaps, I thought, if I had English speakers and professional performers I could have achieved a greater result. But they were not the problem here, I was. My understanding of this world, one that I desperately wanted to co-opt was academic only. The political and creative success borne out of this tradition was one that I had no claim to. Despite my best intentions, there would always be a disconnect between me and this work.

It was only after I returned to the U.S. after this year abroad and met other Fellows at a conference that I realized that others enjoyed more temperate climates and non-academic pursuits like playing the world’s best golf courses or making gondolas. But I, a newly out-gay twenty-two year old felt that it was important to study puppets in blighted economies with repressive laws on sexual orientation.

These cultures had been silenced and so had I, though under different and yes, less severe circumstances. Still, I wanted to belong to this tribe, because I thought that their fumblings, their uncertainties and fits and starts could be my own, could be ours together. By dropping into their world, I hoped to become a native when all I could achieve was permanent alien. I learned a great deal that year, though I may not have figured out the lasting effects of subversive dissident artistic culture on newly opened economies.

After my missionary friends had left the dormitory, a Siberian woman came to stay. She was a translator of Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and German, but she could not speak English. Due to her knowledge of linguistics, though, she could read English and respond in kind. This led us to have nightly conversations with pen and paper passed between us while we ate mackerel and drank tea.

Our conversations were never very deep, I realize now as I look back on these transcripts, my hand thin and scratchy, hers indelibly Cyrillic. But I have notepads full of late night chat as evidence of the many hours we spent together. We were not conversing on great ideas or with any artistic flourish. What we spoke about was simple: how to cook hunter’s stew, why a certain nun was angry today and what I would do when I could walk again. There was no pretense, no ornamentation and no affectation. There were only patient, direct questions and statements and a desire to bridge the gap between what we each thought and what we were learning how to say.